Anthropology 56

Peoples and Cultures of South Asia

This course is both an introduction to the peoples and cultures of that
region of the world that has come to be known as South Asia and to the ways
in which Western knowledge of that region has been constructed and shaped.
India (and by extension the rest of South Asia) has represented to westerners
the very antithesis of Europe: tradition vs. modernity, superstition vs.
rationality, society vs. the individual. Our goal in this course, using
South Asia as an example, is to understand the process by which knowledge
comes to be constructed. Rather than providing a body of essentialized cultural
facts, this course focuses on helping the student to understand the processes
that, over the centuries, have shaped the culture and lifeways of the people
who live on the subcontinent and which link the modern states of South Asia,
historically and culturally, to the world beyond their frontiers.

Required Texts

(Available for purchase in The Hungry Mind Bookstore. One copy of each
of these texts, excepting Metcalf's, is on reserve)